If you’ve ever taken a ceramics class, you know that there’s ample opportunity for failure: Clay can dry too quickly and crumble; a piece may shrink in the kiln and emerge with cracks; the firing can go awry, causing glazes to turn murky colors.

Together he and his wife, designer,Jean Won Mosler, founder of Maum Design, put pretty much everything they had into transforming an industrial building in Gowanus, Brooklyn, so … now they have to make it work. “I’m an artist who needs to sell art … the place is purpose-built and it isn’t made to sell on to the next guy.”

More than a decade after saying goodbye to Wall Street to follow a truly unconventional path, John Mosler still thinks about the what-ifs. They come, concretely, in phone calls – offers to take gigs that would make him the kind of bank that allowed him a lavish lifestyle for the three decades he spent working at financial firms from Solomon to Lehman Brothers.